How to work on cool stuff

I attended the Bay Area Erlang Factory last week. It was a great event. I met many Erlang hackers, attended interesting talks, learned about cool projects (CouchDB, QuickCheck, Nitrogen, Facebook Chat), gave a talk about ErlyWeb, and drank beer (without beer, it wouldn't be a true Erlang meetup).

My favorite talk was by Damien Katz. He told the story of how he had decided to take a risk, quit his job, and work on his then amorphous project. He wanted to work on cool stuff, and that was the only way he could do it. Even if nothing else came out of it, he knew it would have been a great learning exercise. Something great did eventually come out of it, as he created CouchDB (which looks awesome btw) and IBM eventually hired him to work on it full time.

Damiens' story reminded me of the time I started working ErlyWeb a few years ago. After I left the company I was working for at the time, I decided to take a few months and work on something cool. I didn't know what exactly it would be or how long it would take, but I knew that I wanted to build a product that would help people communicate in new ways, and I wanted to build it with my favorite tools. I knew the chance of failure was high, but I figured the learning alone would be worth it. I also viewed open source as an insurance policy of sorts. Even if I couldn't get a product off the ground, my code could live on and continue to provide value to people.

Doing it paid off. My savings dwindled, but I learned Erlang, created ErlyWeb and Vimagi, met many like minded people, and it opened new doors. Now I work on cool stuff at Facebook, ErlyWeb lives on, and every day people are using Vimagi to create amazing art and share it with their friends.

The moral of the story: if you're not working on cool stuff, take a risk and try to make it happen. Don't worry about building the next Google or making lots of money, because you'll probably fail. But the lessons you learn and the connections you make will be worth it.